Flash forward to a digital economy

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Today we can conjure up an array of services with the touch of a finger. We book travel tickets without stepping out of the house, reply to emails from the road, and manage banking, bill payments and shopping, according to our convenience. The outcome of this 24x7 on-demand activity is a huge increase in traffic on the internet, which in turn means that web servers and data centres that support online commerce and services are expected to handle exponentially increasing volumes with no down times.

Not too long ago, one of India’s leading ecommerce portals had a much-hyped and hash-tagged flash sale that ended rather disastrously. Their servers crumbled under the onslaught of heavy network traffic and many transactions were either aborted or couldn’t finish. The backlash from customers on social media took a heavy PR toll. Could flash (storage) have saved the flash sale?

Unfortunately, many online marketplace portals have not been able to keep pace with an enthusiastic digital customer base. For example, during peak hours, IRCTC, the government-owned ticketing portal for the Indian Railways handles ten times the volume of leading private sector ecommerce portals. Indian consumers, who are among the top train travellers in the world, value the convenience of IRCTC online services, but hate the website for its slow and unreliable performance. In response to customer complaints, IRCTC invested in improving the ticketing portal and their upgrade strategy includes adding flash-based storage solutions to address latency issues and significantly improve response times.

To thrive in today’s digital market place, companies have to ensure that their IT infrastructure can scale to handle the traffic and load at all times. Going hand-in-hand with bandwidth and computing power, storage plays a critical role in how systems perform under pressure. Traditional storage technology may offer the capacity, but its IO performance has lagged significantly, making it the bottleneck during peak transaction periods. This is where flash memory solutions for enterprise systems step out into the spotlight.

Flash offers a range of high performance storage options, including the latest integrated all-flash arrays, that provide up to half a petabyte (512 terabytes) of flash storage in a single 3-rack unit and almost twice the performance with 2 million raw IOPS and consistently low latency. In addition to performance and capacity, the beneficial economics has convinced enterprise customers about the all-round benefits of flash.

Flash technology was a catalyst in the mobility revolution that untethered a wide swathe of the global population from rooted devices.  Today it is also proving vital to the enterprise world to keep pace with the demands of mobile, tech-savvy and 24x7 connected consumers. Data-driven enterprises of all types – governance, telecom, ecommerce, finance – are fortifying their digital infrastructure with flash storage to ensure that load spikes can be handled without affecting service levels and to provide the levels of performance and uptime that their customers expect.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to enable the next wave of digital disruptions, connecting 20 billion global “chatty” devices and sensors by 2020. In India, smart cities are being planned and built on an IoT backbone. The Digital India programme promises to connect all citizens to government and public services. All these developments will result in exponentially increasing the amount of data that will have to be processed, managed and harvested. A natural outcome of this is the heavy use of data analytics in the digital marketplace.

Companies are investing in data analytics capabilities to better predict customer trends and offer a customised shopping experience. This further underlines the importance of robust and high-performing data centres to support this new and radically different business model. Given the need for speed in every aspect of business today, efficient and high-performance storage becomes critical for enterprise infrastructure that supports the digital business. The incorporation of flash storage can enable an infrastructure that is higher-performing, more resilient and reliable as well as utilises less space and power. It is the storage that is tailor-made for enterprise systems that have to handle big data and high-speed and sensitive computations.

Enterprises are also coming to the conclusion that flash is cost effective. Flash prices have fallen by more than 25 percent since June 2014.  At the practical level, when organisations evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their data centres, the benefits of operational cost savings and the improved efficiencies of flash storage is clearly evident. Compared to traditional hard drives, enterprise flash storage offers up to five times the density, correspondingly reducing physical space requirements. Power and cooling costs are significantly lower, thanks to five times the energy efficiency, thereby lessening the carbon footprint as well as the bottom-line. Flash is also four times as reliable, which translates to significantly lower down-times and maintenance costs. All these factors have resulted in its increasing adoption by companies looking to scale their IT to stay competitive in a digital marketplace.

The leading providers of flash storage technology have been innovating at a swift place, keeping in mind enterprise IT requirements. They offer a wide range of storage configurations that allow IT planners to customise for their enterprise, including many options that fit onto existing servers to immediately provide a performance boost. Understanding the value of flash technology and deploying it will help companies safely and efficiently scale their IT platforms, and avoid the public disasters of having their systems crack under the pressure of peak traffic. So the savvy enterprises will fortify with flash before their next flash sale!

 - By Vivek Tyagi, Director for India business development, SanDisk Commercial sales and Support at Western Digital Corporation

(This article expresses the views of the author and not necessarily that of his employer.)

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.